JAZ
03-23-2006, 10:36 PM
The Walters Art Museum, including its Contemporary Museum, in Baltimore, Maryland is hosting Louise Bourgeois’ Femme until May 21st. The exhibition intersperses her sculptures among the museum’s own collections of works “from antiquity to the twentieth century” in ways that enrich the meaning of both. Some of the juxtapositions make surprisingly adroit visual connections, others conceptual links and still others startling, stimulating contrasts.
Her Fallen Woman, a porcelain work with a highly polished gold head attached to a “body” like a slick, black eggplant lay in a vitrine among French works of the late 19th and early 20th including the delicate white chalcedony “Invocation of the Titanic” by Georges Tonnelier, a tiny standing figure with outstretched arms.
Her Knife Figure and Femme Couteau, two stitched fabric dolls with saws and knives in place of heads lay threateningly posed below a glass shelf on which the Allegories of the Five Senses, five polychrome glazed porcelain females with flowing skirts of the 1730s, stood with courtly pretense, in a strange conceptual yin-yang.
In a room with 13th-15th century art including madonnas, and a depiction of the Massacre of the Innnocents, were her fabric and stainless steel Umbilical Cord and a vitrine with her fabric and marble The Family, consisting of a pink marble block with three egg shaped depressions each containing a stitched fabric doll and each with a shell-like covering of pink mesh fabric.They were eerily compatible with the vivid paintings of religious scenes that surrounded them.
Another Femme Couteau (1982) lay immediately below a 1640 painting, Judith Decapitating Holofernes, by Trophine Bigot. Both represent cutting or slicing in conjunction with feminine forces. With many of the works (which were all identifiable by the bright pink wall labels) there were quotes by Bourgeois. What she says about this Femme Couteau: “She tries to be frightening, but she is frightened…she is afraid somebody is going to invade her privacy or bother her in some way that she won’t be able to defend what she’s responsible for.” It is as though she was speaking of the painting, but no, it is her black marble Femme Couteau that is referred to.
It was intriguing to range the galleries hunting for the Bourgeois works, at times to be genuinely surprised by something that seemed to be one of the antiquities, only to discover otherwise. One remarkable example is her bronze Nature Study (1984), sometimes referred to as The Dog. Approaching it from behind one sees a bronze dog sitting on its haunches with the knobs of its spine showing. It seems like a traditional hunting dog. As you walk around towards the front you discover that it has no head and its very natural-looking front feet have been abbreviated just above the toes, which has been made necessary to allow for the six large breasts that take the place of the small nipples one would expect. Its muscular pose, amputations and enhancements along with its otherwise sinuous naturalism makes this quite and intriguing piece. Here is a picture of Nature Study, though not a terribly good one: http://www.cfa.ilstu.edu/cmkukla/technique/index.html
I've seen some of the sculptures in this show elsewhere, on their own, but found the juxtapositions with the older works exciting.
JAZ
Her Fallen Woman, a porcelain work with a highly polished gold head attached to a “body” like a slick, black eggplant lay in a vitrine among French works of the late 19th and early 20th including the delicate white chalcedony “Invocation of the Titanic” by Georges Tonnelier, a tiny standing figure with outstretched arms.
Her Knife Figure and Femme Couteau, two stitched fabric dolls with saws and knives in place of heads lay threateningly posed below a glass shelf on which the Allegories of the Five Senses, five polychrome glazed porcelain females with flowing skirts of the 1730s, stood with courtly pretense, in a strange conceptual yin-yang.
In a room with 13th-15th century art including madonnas, and a depiction of the Massacre of the Innnocents, were her fabric and stainless steel Umbilical Cord and a vitrine with her fabric and marble The Family, consisting of a pink marble block with three egg shaped depressions each containing a stitched fabric doll and each with a shell-like covering of pink mesh fabric.They were eerily compatible with the vivid paintings of religious scenes that surrounded them.
Another Femme Couteau (1982) lay immediately below a 1640 painting, Judith Decapitating Holofernes, by Trophine Bigot. Both represent cutting or slicing in conjunction with feminine forces. With many of the works (which were all identifiable by the bright pink wall labels) there were quotes by Bourgeois. What she says about this Femme Couteau: “She tries to be frightening, but she is frightened…she is afraid somebody is going to invade her privacy or bother her in some way that she won’t be able to defend what she’s responsible for.” It is as though she was speaking of the painting, but no, it is her black marble Femme Couteau that is referred to.
It was intriguing to range the galleries hunting for the Bourgeois works, at times to be genuinely surprised by something that seemed to be one of the antiquities, only to discover otherwise. One remarkable example is her bronze Nature Study (1984), sometimes referred to as The Dog. Approaching it from behind one sees a bronze dog sitting on its haunches with the knobs of its spine showing. It seems like a traditional hunting dog. As you walk around towards the front you discover that it has no head and its very natural-looking front feet have been abbreviated just above the toes, which has been made necessary to allow for the six large breasts that take the place of the small nipples one would expect. Its muscular pose, amputations and enhancements along with its otherwise sinuous naturalism makes this quite and intriguing piece. Here is a picture of Nature Study, though not a terribly good one: http://www.cfa.ilstu.edu/cmkukla/technique/index.html
I've seen some of the sculptures in this show elsewhere, on their own, but found the juxtapositions with the older works exciting.
JAZ